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After just a bit of TV experience doing weather on WFLA TV and The John McKay Show on WTOG, in 1984, Jack got a call from Dick Ahern at Channel 13.  Ahern explained that the Pulse Plus! host was departing, and wanted Jack to take over. “I thought ‘Good Lord…this is an immensely popular show” recalls Jack. “I assumed he had seen me at an event speaking or something like that, and we decide to get together at Malio’s for lunch.   When I got there it became obvious that this was the first time he had ever seen me. I thought ‘How do you hire somebody for television when you have never even seen them?’ He had never even seen a picture of me.” Jack joked about how he “could have had hatchet marks down my face and I would still have gotten that job.”

On his first day at WTVT,  Jack remembers having a stomach full of butterflies. “I was as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs,” he states. “I had done TV before but I had never done an hour long show of that magnitude with that many viewers. I had done the John McKay show and a lot of stuff on Channel 44, but most of it was taped. The only thing I had done live was the Jerry Lewis telethon which was a heck of a lot different than Pulse Plus!. But to be a host and having to bring that show all together, I was really nervous.”

JACK WITH THE LOVELY CO-HOST OF 'WHEEL OF FORTUNE,' VANNA WHITE

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Pulse Plus! Producer Joe Wiezycki threw Jack a curve on his first day. “I had a guest who supposedly had voices within him, who told him things. I don’t know where Joe got his guest, but this guy said he had a spirit within him who guided his life; these things inside him would tell him to do things and conducted his life.” About halfway through the interview, the man’s voice became very deep as his inner spirits came out. “I felt like an idiot and I am saying, ‘Is that you talking or is it that guy down inside you?’  It was like a bit from Saturday Night Live.”

Wary but determined to succeed, Jack made it through Thursday. “On Friday we had Vanessa Williams, a Miss America at that time and Jimmy Dean the sausage king. He was in town to promote his sausage and that’s all he wanted to talk about, and he was really wild. He was the most out of control guest I have ever seen…even more than the guy with the multiple personalities. When I finished with Jimmy Dean that day, I thought ‘I’ll never have another difficult day. I’ll never have another nervous moment.’ Because getting through that was the most difficult thing I had ever done and from then on everything would be downhill in TV and it has been.”

JACK WITH HIS 'GOOD LITTLE BUDDY' FROM 'GILLIGAN'S ISLAND', BOB DENVER